“I have plenty of money saved,” he said, even though it was a lie. If there was an honest exit, he would find a way to pay for it. Abrahim’s response was always the same. “A man who has no patience here is better off in Hell.”
Two weeks after the first stories of the rebellion appeared, there was talk in the market of a mile-long convoy of jeeps heading toward the town. The rebels were advancing and would be there by the end of the afternoon. They would spare no one. They would attack only the soldiers. They would be greeted as liberators. They were like animals and should be treated as such. Within hours the rumors had swirled the town into a frenzy. Soldiers were on the move in every street, but it was hard to tell if they were running or taking up defensive positions. The convoy was now two miles long and there were possible tanks in the background. A general from the army had defected to the rebels and had moved his troops with him. Even the capital, Khartoum, was no longer safe and possibly even under attack at that moment.
My father watched as the women who lived in all the nearby houses folded their belongings into bags and suitcases and made for the road with their children at their side or strapped to their backs. Where are they going? he wondered. They have the sea on one side and a desert on the other.
Abrahim found him during lunch resting under his usual tree. They walked back to the café where my father had once worked. There was no one to serve them tea.
“It’s very busy,” Abrahim said. “Maybe we should come back when it’s less crowded?”
“Give me a few minutes,” my father said. “I know the owner. Let me try to find us a table.”
It was the first joke he had made in months, and as if to acknowledge that, neither one said anything for a few seconds, long enough for my father to wonder if he shouldn’t try to offer Abrahim tea after all.
“Are you leaving?” my father finally asked him.
“I already have,” Abrahim said. “A long time ago. My entire family is in Khartoum. I’m just waiting for my body to join them.”
Abrahim didn’t ask my father if he was planning on leaving. He knew my father had nowhere to go—no relations in neighboring villages he could turn to. To be a refugee once was hard enough—you abandon home and family in order to start all over again in a foreign country with nothing. To be one again, before you had even settled, was pointless. After that, one had to accept that you could never run far enough; God or the devil would always find you.
Abrahim suggested they watch whatever was going to happen from the roof of the boardinghouse.
“At least that way,” he said, “we have a good seat.”
By late in the afternoon they could hear mortar shells slamming into the desert.
“They’re like children with toys,” Abrahim said, pointing west, toward where the rebels were supposed to be advancing from. “They don’t even know yet how far they can shoot with their big guns. There’s nothing out there—or maybe they’ll get lucky and kill a camel. They’ll keep doing that until eventually they run out of shells, or camels. It’s just a question of which one is going to happen first.”
They were the only two men standing on the roof, but across the town they could see other men in similar positions, with their hands raised to their brows as they stared west. Every now and then there was another shallow explosion, and a burst of sand could be seen flying into the air.
“It’s going to be terrible what happens to them,” Abrahim said. “They think they can scare away the soldiers because they have a couple of big guns. They think it’s 1898 and the Battle of Omdurman again, except now they’re the British.”
My father never thought that war could look so pathetic, but from that rooftop it did. The rebels were loudly announcing their approach, and, from what my father could see, the soldiers in the town had disappeared. He began to think that Abrahim was wrong, and that the rebels, despite their foolishness, would sweep into town with barely a struggle. He was debating whether to say this to Abrahim when he heard the first distant rumbling over his head. Abrahim and my father looked out toward the sea, where a plane was approaching, flying far too low. Within less than a minute it was over them.
“This will be over soon,” Abrahim said. They both waited to hear the sound of a bomb dropping, but nothing happened. The plane had pulled up at the last minute. Shots were harmlessly fired in its direction and the convoy kept approaching—a long, jagged line of old jeeps trying to escape the horizon.
Neither one of them spoke after that. Nothing had happened yet, but soon something terrible would take place and it would be over so quickly that there would hardly be time to acknowledge it. They were trying hard to do so before the moment passed.
When the same plane returned twenty minutes later, three slimmer and clearly foreign-made jets were flying close to it.
“The first was just a warning,” Abrahim said. “To give them a chance to at least try to run away. They were too stupid to understand that. They thought they had won.”
The planes passed. My father and Abrahim counted the seconds. Forty-three for my father, twenty-one for Abrahim, before the first shots were fired. Even from a distance they made a spectacular roar—at least seven bombs were dropped directly onto rebels, whose convoy disappeared into a cloud of smoke and sand. From some of the other neighboring rooftops there were shouts of joy. Soldiers were soon spilling out into the street singing of their victory.
“They should never have tried to take the port,” Abrahim said. “They could have spent years fighting in the desert for their little villages and no one would have really bothered them. But do you think any of those big countries was going to risk losing this beautiful port? By the end of tonight all the foreign ships will come back. Their governments will tell them that it’s safe. They’ve taken care of the problem, and soon, maybe in a day or two, you’ll be able to leave.”
A week later, during his midafternoon break on September 4, 1975, Abrahim found my father resting under his normal spot in the shade, staring out at the water. He kicked him once in the ribs, like a dog.
“Look at you, resting here like a typical Sudanese. Maybe you belong here after all.”
The two of them walked to a nearby café, and for the first time since my father came to Sudan someone brought him a cup of tea and lunch.
“This is your going-away meal. Enjoy it,” Abrahim said. “You’re leaving tonight.”
Abrahim ordered for the both of them: a large plate of grilled meats—sheep intestines and what looked to be the neck of a goat—cooked in a brown stew, a feast unlike anything my father had eaten in four months. When the food came he almost wanted to cry and was briefly afraid to eat it. Abrahim had always told him never to trust anyone, and of course my father had extended that advice to Abrahim himself. Good men were hard to find anywhere, and here there seemed to be none at all. Perhaps this was Abrahim’s final trick on him. Perhaps the food would disappear just as he leaned over to touch it, or perhaps it was poisoned with something that would send him off into a deep sleep from which he would awake in shackles. My father reached into his pants and untied the pouch in which he carried all his money. He placed it on the table.
“That’s everything I have,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s enough.”
Abrahim ignored the money and dipped into the food with a piece of bread.
“After where your hand has just been, I suggest you wash it before eating. Take your purse with you.”
When my father came back, all the food except for a small portion had been pushed to his side of the plate.
“Eat,” Abrahim said. “You’re going to need all of it.”
When they were finished, Abrahim walked my father to a part of town he had never seen before—a wide, dusty street that gradually grew increasingly narrow until the tin-roofed shacks that lined it were almost touching. The few men they passed along the way walked quickly, with their heads turned, as if they were being issued from a factory with explicit directions to walk and move in uni
son. They stopped in front of one of the houses and Abrahim pulled back the curtain that served as the door. Inside, a heavyset older woman with her head partly veiled sat behind a wooden counter on top of which rested a row of variously sized glass bottles. Abrahim grabbed one and told my father to take a seat in the corner of the room where a group of pillows had been laid. He negotiated with the woman for several minutes until, finally, he pulled a large bundle of Sudanese notes from his breast pocket. He counted off three and handed them to the woman before choosing a bottle from the counter. He sat next to my father and handed it to him.
“A drink for the road,” he said. “Take it slow.”
If Abrahim’s intention was to harm my father, then so be it, he thought. A decent meal and a drink afterward were not the worst way to go. If such things had been offered to every dying man in this town, my father imagined, then the line of men waiting to die would have stretched for miles.
“Give me your little purse now,” Abrahim said. He handed him the pouch and Abrahim flipped through the bills quickly. He then took a few notes from his own pile of money and added it to the collection.
“This will buy you water, maybe a little food, and the silence of a few people on board. Don’t expect anything else from them. Don’t ask for food or for anything that they don’t give you. Don’t look at them in the eyes and don’t try to talk to them. They will act as if you don’t exist, which is the best thing. If you do exist, then they will throw you overboard at night. It’s happened many times before. Men get on board and they begin to complain. They say their backs hurt or their legs hurt. They say they’re thirsty or hungry. When that happens they’re gagged and thrown into the sea where they can have all the space and water they want.”
My father took a sip of the spirits, whose harsh, acrid smell had filled the air from the moment Abrahim popped the lid.
“When you get to Europe, this is what you are going to do. You are going to be arrested. You will tell them that you want political asylum, and they will take you to a jail that looks like Heaven. They will give you food and clothes and even a bed to sleep in. You may never want to leave—that’s how good it will feel. Tell them you were fighting against the Communists and they will love you. They will give you your pick of countries and you will tell them that you want to go to England. You will tell them that you have left behind your wife in Sudan, and that her life is now in danger and you want her to come as well. You will show them this picture.”
And here Abrahim pulled from his wallet a photograph of a girl, no older than fifteen or sixteen, dressed in a bizarre array of Western clothes—a pleated black-and-white polka-dot dress that was several sizes too large, along with a pair of black heels, and makeup that had been painted on to make her look older.
“This is my daughter. She lives in Khartoum with her mother and aunts. She’s very bright. The best student in her class. A town like this is no place for a girl, so I sent her there some months back. When you get to England you’re going to say she’s your wife. This is how you’re going to repay me. Do you understand?”
And although my father didn’t understand, he knew it was better to wait silently until an explanation was given.
“This is proof of your marriage,” Abrahim said. “I had to spend a lot of money to get that made.”
Abrahim handed him a slip of paper that had been carefully folded and unfolded perhaps only twice in its lifetime, since such paper didn’t last long in environments like this. Everything on it had been neatly typed out, once in Arabic at the top and then again in English, with an official-looking stamp at the very bottom of the page. The words spelled it out clearly. My father had been married for almost two years to someone he had never met.
“You will give this to someone at the British embassy,” Abrahim said, laying his hands on top of my father’s, as if the two were entering into a pact simply by touching the same piece of paper. “God willing, maybe you will even give it to the ambassador. You should try to give it only to him. It will be better that way. It may take some weeks but eventually they will give her the visa. You will call me then from London, and I will take care of the rest. We have the money for the ticket and some more for the both of you when she arrives. Maybe after one or two years her mother and I will join you in London. We will buy a home. Start a business together. My daughter will continue her studies.”
Even for a skeptical man like my father, who had little to no faith in governments, the story was seductive: a tale that began with heavenly prisons and ended with a premade family living in a home in London. He didn’t want to see how much Abrahim believed in it himself and so he kept his head turned in the direction of the large woman behind the counter, who seemed to be listening in with approval, as if she had been thinking of the same thing. It was obvious to my father from the moment Abrahim began speaking that he was completely convinced that everything he said was not only possible but seemingly inevitable, in part because this plan had already been in place for years—
“I’ve thought about this for a long time. Ever since my daughter was born. There is no certainty in a place like this. You’ve seen that. I’ve been expecting something terrible to happen for quite some time. It didn’t happen the other day, but eventually it will, and how can a man live like that. Always in fear.”
—and in part because what else was there to believe in. When it came to Europe or America, men supposedly hardened by time and experience like Abrahim were susceptible to almost childish fantasies. They assigned to these faraway lands all the ideals of benevolence and good governance lacking in their own, because who among us doesn’t want to believe that such places exist.
My father took the photograph from Abrahim and placed it in his pocket. He didn’t say, “Of course I will do this,” or even a simple “Yes,” because such confirmation would have meant that there was an option to refuse, and no such thing existed between them. He expected Abrahim to place a hand on his shoulder, a type of gentle almost fatherly embrace, but there was nothing of the sort. Instead he motioned for him to finish his drink. “Your ship is waiting,” he said.
XXI
The last thing my father claimed he remembered seeing were the golden tips of a thousand heads of corn rushing toward him as the car descended into the ditch. After that he went completely blank, his head battered by the dashboard and his neck severely strained but not quite broken. There were deep cuts under his eyes and thumb-sized gashes above his eyebrows. Only the strange incline on which they had landed had kept him from flying through the windshield, out into the same rows of corn he had just gazed upon. The steep angle of the descent had folded him almost cleanly in half over the steering wheel, breaking his bottom two ribs, while leaving my mother only dazed from the knock her head had taken against the sun visor. Her belt, which she tugged at from the ceiling as soon as she knew how to, had protected her after all, and even though she had no right to think so, she felt certain that her child was safe as well.
When she opened her eyes she would have seen roughly the exact same scene that I’m staring out at now—a vast and seemingly unrestrained portrait of wealth in the heart of America. It’s long been a dream of mine to pull my car off the side of the road and enter into one of these great fields, ever since I was a child and my mother and I would make our aborted getaway attempts. Why, I used to wonder, worry about making it to St. Louis or Chicago as she had so often planned when right here before us there were thousands of acres of crops in which we could just as easily get lost. If it was in the afternoon and if the sun was out, then I even imagined the warmth that must have radiated outward from the center of such fields, one that could sustain life throughout even the coldest of winters and that would provide us with enough comfort to live on for years. And while my car is not in a ditch as theirs was, it is sitting half balanced on the side of the road, somewhat precariously positioned, as if a slight push could send it tumbling down. If asked by anyone what I’m doing here, I’ll say I’m looking for s
omething I lost, something important that I accidentally let fly out the window somewhere right around here more than thirty years ago, and now I’ve finally come back to retrieve it.
After taking account of the dashboard and windshield, my mother would have seen that field at eye level, from a perspective that suggested she could glide through the windshield and straight into the rows of corn, hovering just slightly above them so that their tips tickled her stomach as she flew over. Only after that would she have remembered my father sitting next to her, unconscious, and for all she knew barely breathing, and everything that she had done to bring him here, from unclasping his belt to waiting for his hand to take hold of her head before leaning over and, for a few seconds, seizing full control over the steering wheel. She hadn’t expected it but a great violent storm of regret was preparing to swell up in her as she considered his possible death. What neither of them had ever said to each other, she said to him now: I’m sorry; or maybe it was, Forgive me. With this part I’ve always had a hard time deciding whether if she said either or nothing at all matters.
There were a number of competing desires and options for her to consider. There was a desire to comfort and stay close, to pull a tissue from her purse and wipe away the blood from my father’s head, and maybe even cradle it in her lap as she would a child. Only once, shortly after they were married in Ethiopia, had she been able to do that, and that was on the evening before he left. He had placed his head there out of his own free will and let himself be comforted. He was supposed to leave the next day with two friends for safer borders but had been picked up and arrested before he was even out of the city, an act that had hardly surprised him. That was the last memory she had of him before he disappeared and resurfaced years later in America, and for much of that time it had spurred her on to keep him close even after others had assured her that he was dead.
How to Read the Air Page 21
